Get a hundred to fix that fatigue
Kevin Pietersen has just scored his third hundred of the summer - an innings that may set up a 1-0 lead for England in their three-Test series against India
Nishi Narayanan
25-Feb-2013
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Kevin Pietersen has just scored his third hundred of the summer - an innings that may set up a 1-0 lead for England in their three-Test series against India. A week before the start of the first Test Pietersen had remarked that the huge amount of cricket over the last season had made him "mentally fatigued". Geoffery Dean, at the Times believes five days in Monaco with his fiancee, Jessica Taylor, appears to have done much for Kevin Pietersen. He writes:
Whereas most players are apt to tiptoe through the nineties, navigating them as sensitively as a ship passing through the Panama Canal, Pietersen likes to select full throttle.
Lawrence Booth, in the Guardian feels that though Pietersen insists his remark was blown out of proportion, his reaction on reaching the hundred betrayed a thought process that was less than clear.
Needing a single for his third hundred of the summer, he worked Kumble through midwicket then charged excitedly another pitch length towards the Nursery End before dropping to one knee and pointing his bat towards his fiancée, the singer Jessica Taylor, in the Edrich Stand. If, as she claimed recently, she didn't know he was a batsman when they first met, she probably did now.
In the same paper, Steve James writes that the display of accuracy and skill James Anderson, Ryan Sidebottom, and Chris Tremlett meant that from England's Fab Four - Steve Harmison, Matthew Hoggard, Simon Jones, and Andrew Flintoff - were hardly missed at Lord's.
Meanwhile Mark Nicholas saves some column inches for James Anderson who he feels has had his late outswinger made more potent after a year of working on his inswinger.
Nishi Narayanan is a staff writer at ESPNcricinfo